Six

"Thank God, Decontie has finally gotten off his butt and is doing something about Fleur.” Teht’aa shifted her gaze to me from the road zipping by in front of us.

Her annoyance did little to mar the model-like beauty of her high cheek-boned features. In fact, a hot-blooded male would probably be drawn to her inflamed looks like a moth.

Teht’aa was a result of a teenage pregnancy when Eric was playing hockey out west. Her mother, wanting nothing more to do with the young man who seemed more intent on living in the white man’s world than his own, returned to her northern Dené reserve, where she died shortly after their child was born. Eric never knew. It took twenty-two years for him to discover that he had a daughter. Teht’aa had been living with him on and off ever since.

“Watch out!” I cried as another sharp curve fast approached.

She flicked her eyes back to the road and manoeuvred Eric’s Grand Cherokee as expertly through this turn as she had the other twists of this narrow two-lane highway that clung to the ragged shoreline of the Gatineau River. Carless herself, Teht’aa was taking advantage of her father’s absence. Apparently he’d been on a big canoe trip up in the Northwest Territories before going to Vancouver for some GCFN meetings. But according to his itinerary, he would finally be coming home today. His flight wouldn’t land until early afternoon, too late for him to join the search, which was just as well. There was no way I could’ve spent ten minutes with him, let alone a couple of hours cooped up in a car.

We were driving southbound on Hwy 105, known as the “Killer Highway” for its high incidence of traffic deaths. As if to reinforce this reputation, a car shot out of a driveway in front of us. Teht’aa braked, narrowly missing the rear bumper as the compact car veered into the opposite lane.

“That stupid idiot didn’t even look,” Teht’aa cursed.

“You could slow down,” I hazarded, releasing my grip on the dashboard. I supposed she was being heavier on the gas pedal than usual in her haste to get to the search site.

She shot me an annoyed glance but did slow down … a bit.

In addition to ourselves, we were transporting Wendy and her husband George, part of the overflow who couldn’t get seats on the two buses chartered to carry people to the location where Becky’s body had been found. We’d left the reserve as the sun lit up the spire of Migiskan’s All Saints Church and had been on the road for the past hour and a half.

“Yup, Will just sat on his fat butt eating bannock,” Wendy quipped from the backseat before popping another Timbit into her mouth. Her plump, junk-food-fed figure made me wonder who was calling whom fat. It also suggested she was more at home in front of a TV than spending a day tramping through the bush. I wondered how long she would last.

Like us, they hadn’t hesitated to join the search for one of their own. In fact, so many people had turned up at dawn at the Council Hall that the Lightbodys had to scramble to find additional transportation, which was why Teht’aa and I were in Eric’s Jeep.

It had taken the Lightbodys the better part of a week to organize the search for their missing daughter. In addition to Decontie’s support, they were also using a volunteer organization specializing in such searches. The main hold-up had been the Quebec government, which had at first turned down their request to conduct the search on Crown land. But after it made headline news, a bureaucrat had reluctantly given his approval with the proviso that it be conducted under the oversight of the provincial police.

Decontie had laughed. “Serves the SQ right,” he’d said. But he wasn’t expecting more than a nominal presence on their part, nothing for us to be concerned about.

“But surely Will would’ve done something when her mother reported her missing,” I now asked. I’d been in the Far North when her parents raised the alarm.

“Nada, zip, nothing,” Wendy answered. “He told Marie-Claude she wasn’t his problem. Since she’d gone missing in Ottawa, it was up to the Ottawa police to find her.”

“I suppose in a way he’s right. Ottawa is outside his jurisdiction.”

“Yeah, but she’s a member of our community. He coulda made the Ottawa police do something, eh? Instead he done nothing. He left it up to Jeff and Marie-Claude to try and get their butts moving.”

I was sorry to hear this. I’d always respected the police chief and felt he did the best he could to maintain the peace and security of the thousand or so residents of the remote Quebec community.

“At least he’s doing something now,” I said.

“Almost two months later, when it could very well be too late,” Teht’aa shot back.

“Jeez, I tell ya, this search is sure making me real nervous, eh?” Wendy said. “I figure it’s bad news if we find something belonging to Fleur. And I sure don’t wanna be the one to find her body.”

“I couldn’t agree with you more,” I replied. “Still, I think it has to be done. Hopefully we won’t find anything, and we can all breath easier knowing she wasn’t with Becky when she was killed.”

“I sure hope you’re right,” Wendy sighed. “What a shame. Such a good kid. She never gets into trouble, not like a lotta kids on the rez. Mind you, Jeff’s pretty strict, so she probably doesn’t get much chance to get up to any mischief.”

“I think she manages to do her bit,” Teht’aa chuckled. “I came across her and Pete Smith’s boy smoking pot in the woods behind the Rec Centre. And from the guilty expressions on their faces, I wasn’t sure what else they’d been up to.”

George laughed. “Yeah, I figured she weren’t such an angel when I caught her with Eddy Tenasco at the pow-wow. Things were sure hot and heavy. She’d been drinking too, something I know Jeff sure don’t like.”

Wendy answered. “I tell ya, I was kinda surprised he let her go to Ottawa on her own like that. But maybe Marie-Claude convinced him it’d be okay. After all, Fleur was gonna stay with her brother, the professor.”

“Except she didn’t,” I said. “Anyone got any ideas why not?”

“Nope, it don’t make sense,” Wendy replied. “And it don’t make sense she ran away. Jeez, I sure hope she’s okay.”

“I think we’d all second that,” I said.

A sudden chill seemed to fill the car as each of us lapsed into our own separate silence, afraid of where further discussion might lead us. The sun that had started the morning with such promise had vanished. Clouds heavy with moisture filled the sky, and the first drops of rain were splattering the windshield.

“Oh crap, I didn’t bring my rain jacket,” Wendy wailed. “Or rubber boots.”

“You ain’t gonna melt, honey,” was George’s flippant retort. “There’s too much of ya.” He followed this with a loud guffaw and a resounding slap on her thigh. In contrast to his wife’s lush flesh, George was stringbean thin, his face gaunt and bronzed from years of guiding wealthy fishermen and hunters.

“Now stop that, George,” Wendy said, trying to sound annoyed, but she couldn’t quite hide from her voice the pleasure of being loved.

Thankfully, the rain had slowed to a drizzle by the time we drove into Parking Lot 48 on the northeast side of Gatineau Park. I say thankfully, for in my rush to leave, I’d also forgotten my rain gear.

A couple of SQ cops were leaning up against their cruiser, paying little attention to the few people who’d preceded us. I didn’t expect to see the bulk of the searchers for another twenty minutes or so. We’d breezed past one of the buses and left the other one in the Council Hall parking lot waiting for a searcher who suddenly remembered she’d forgotten to turn off her stove.

A man wearing a fluorescent lime green vest approached us and identified himself as a member of Ottawa Valley Search and Rescue. After taking down our names on his clipboard, he told us to help ourselves to the hot coffee and donuts being doled out from the back of a nearby van.

As the four of us walked to join the others crowded around the van, I pointed at the surrounding crush of trees and underbrush. “No wonder Will was so annoyed at the SQ for not spending more time. It would’ve been next to impossible to do a thorough search in only a few hours.”

“Yeah, but do you think a bunch of amateurs can do any better?” Teht’aa said.

“I’m sure these search guys are going to tell us what to do,” Wendy added. She stopped to zip up her jacket. “Brrr … it’s cold. It sure don’t feel like September, eh?”

“At least the rain has stopped.” I zipped up my fleece jacket and stuck my freezing hands into my pockets. I’d forgotten my gloves too.

“I tell you, if the missing girl were white, these cops would be crawling all over the place.” Teht’aa glanced in my direction. “No reflection on you, Meg.”

I didn’t reply. Teht’aa never expected me to. A native activist, she often threw out these one-liners as if testing my own biases. Often her opinions were just a little too militant and one-sided for my liking, but in this case, I was inclined to agree. I’d had my own first-hand experience with the blinkers cops wore when dealing with natives.

At that point, Will Decontie arrived in his police vehicle with Jeff sitting beside him in the front and Marie-Claude sitting forlornly by herself in the back seat.